News and Announcements

CKS to Welcome new Program Director: Dr. Stephanie K. Kim

The Center for Korean Studies is pleased to announce the selection of our new Program Director, Dr. Stephanie K. Kim. Stephanie received her Ph.D. in Education from UCLA, with a dissertation focused on efforts to globalize higher education in South Korea. She also holds an MA in Global Affairs from NYU, and a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan. Stephanie has extensive experience with academic programming and event coordination, and will be able to bring her scholarly expertise to the work of managing the activities of CKS. She comes to us directly from a position as a Korea Foundation Post-Doctoral researcher here at UC Berkeley. Stephanie will take over the responsibilities of outgoing Program Director Dylan Davis, who leaves later this month to accept his new position as the Country Representative of the Asia Foundation in Korea. Much as we are sad to see Dylan leave us, we are also very grateful to have had a highly qualified pool of applicants for this position, and we are looking forward to Stephanie's term as CKS Program Director.

Thanks, also, go to the members of the search committee, particularly Marty Backstrom, and to the CKS staff — Dianne-Enpa Cho, Yunhee Roh, and Associate Director Clare You for their hard work during this transition!

Previous Colloquia Schedules

Dylan Davis, Recipient of a Fellowship to the U.S.-Korea Scholar-Policymaker Nexus

Dylan Davis, program director of the Center for Korean Studies, was awarded a fellowship to the U.S.-Korea Scholar-Policymaker Nexus, a Mansfield Foundation/Korea Foundation fellowship program for Korea specialists making long-term contributions to the U.S.-Korea relationship.

Recent Publications

K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea seeks at once to describe and explain the emergence of export-oriented South Korean popular music and to make sense of larger South Korean economic and cultural transformations. John Lie provides not only a history of South Korean popular music — the premodern background, Japanese colonial influence, post-Liberation American impact, and recent globalization — but also a description of K-pop as a system of economic innovation and cultural production. In doing so, he delves into the broader background of South Korea in this wonderfully informed history and analysis of a pop culture phenomenon sweeping the globe.

Mobile Subjects draws attention to modern Korean experiences with mobility, experiences that played an important role in forming Korean constructions of an ethnonationalistic discourse of territoriality. Much has already been written to shed light on the latter. Not nearly as much has been done to examine Korean mobility, especially in connection with the formation of Korean subjectivity from the nonpeninsular perspectives of movement and mobility. By drawing attention to mobility in subjectivity — to the contested nature of subjectivity in the processes of mobility — this volume seeks to connect the experiences of the Korean diaspora with those of the homeland, thereby enriching an understanding of Korean nationalism from its flip side.

In the Service of His Korean Majesty: William Nelson Lovatt, the Pusan Customs,
and Sino-Korean Relations, 1876–1888Patterson, Wayne
Korea Research Monograph 35
2012. 209 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1-55729-100-4
ISBN-10: 1-55729-100-4
$20.00

"This book is a useful corrective to the usual focus on Seoul in studies of early modern Korea. Using newly discovered data, Patterson shows us what life was like in Pusan at that time. He also sheds new light on what China was trying to accomplish in Korea in the 1880s."
–Don Baker, University of British Columbia

"Wayne Patterson has written an illuminating account of one of the earliest cases of a sustained interaction between Koreans and Westerners. His portrayal of William Nelson Lovatt's time in Pusan will be of interest to students and scholars of Chosŏn Korea's foreign relations—political, commercial, and cultural."
–Kirk W. Larsen, Brigham Young University